Decline & Fall DVD to be Released in USA

Posted on September 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Acorn TV will begin USA sales of the DVD of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall later this month. This is the BBC’s adaptation that was broadcast in the UK earlier this year. Amazon.com has announced availability of the DVD effective 12 September. You can read a review of all three episodes in the latest issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies at this link (click on “Rising Returns” under Reviews). The DVD also includes 15 minutes of special features not available on the televised version. Here is the Amazon.com description of this additional material:

  • Satire (5 min.) – Cast and crew members discuss the intricacies and difficulties of adapting Evelyn Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek satire for the screen.
  • On Set (5 min.) – Cast and crew members discuss the locations and sets used for filming Decline & Fall.
  • Adaptation (5 min.) – Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel is beloved by many; cast and crew members discuss their desire to stay true to the source in their modern adaptation.
  • Photo Gallery

 

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Waugh in the Food Columns

Posted on August 31, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Lisa Hilton, biographer, novelist and now food critic for Standpoint magazine, was apparently assigned to write a review of a new Italian restaurant in Covent Garden called Margot. This establishment was downgraded by some other food critics such as Jay Rayner for being too formal for present Londoners. After offering a brief defense of Margot’s formality and praise for its food, Hilton launches into the topic she really wants to write about which is the Southern Italian region of Puglia. She gets there by quoting Evelyn Waugh in this introduction:

Puglia makes me think of Evelyn Waugh’s comment on the Sphinx: “As a piece of sculpture it is wholly inadequate to its fame. People . . . went out to see it by moonlight and returned very grave and awestruck; which only shows the mesmeric effect of publicity. It is about as enigmatic and inscrutable as Mr Aleister Crowley.” Poor, tatty, overcrowded Europe of course retains some places of genuine beauty, but why will no one admit that the French Riviera nowadays resembles at best the less-unpleasant areas of Los Angeles, or that Ibiza is no longer a “White Isle” in any sense but the narcotic one? English people love Puglia, because they think it’s the real Italy…

The quote is from Waugh’s 1930 travel book Labels (p. 102). Waugh later spent time in Puglia during WWII because its chief town Bari was the staging base for his outpost in Yugoslavia. The food served during that period was probably not worth mentioning, although may well have been better than what was on offer in the UK.

Waugh surfaces in another food story, this one about obesity. This is posted on the weblog ConservativeHome.com by MEP Daniel Hannan who thinks that the UK government’s campaign against obesity has gone too far and is at risk of becoming yet another example of unnecessary and annoying interference in private lives. He closes his article with this quote from Waugh:

By what right, though, do we presume to tell people what to eat? “There are,” wrote Evelyn Waugh, “no respectable reasons for wanting not to be fat”. To reject the good things in life from no higher motive than vanity was, as he saw it, a tragically modern form of decadence. All right, Waugh was not exactly a good example of a contented fat man. Although he was the soul of elegance on the page, he was selfish, irritable and sadistic in person. So let me instead give the last word, as I gave the first, to Shakespeare, and through him to the amplest, merriest and wittiest fatty to have graced our literature, John Falstaff: “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!”

The source of this quote has proved elusive, although Mr Hannan has cited it previously in a 2008 article where he attacked the then Labour government and the EU for the same anti-obesity policies. It does sound a bit like Waugh but would he have used a double negative? I wonder if this may be a paraphrase rather than a quote?

Finally, and unrelated to food, the V&A Museum has mounted an exhibit of the artworks from the books of the Folio Society to mark the society’s 70th anniversary. This is called “The Artful Book” and will be on display from 5 September until 28 January. Among the works on display are illustrations by Kate Baylay for the Folio Society’s 2015  edition of Vile Bodies. Some of these are reproduced in the announcement appearing in digitalartsonline.

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Waugh Item Included in Vivien Leigh Sale

Posted on August 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian has reported the sale of several items (including many books) from the estate of actress Vivien Leigh. The sale at Sotheby’s London on 26 September is occasioned by the recent death of her daughter, Suzanne Farrington. Leigh herself died in 1967. Lot 215 consists of one of the 50 large print copies of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) signed: “For Vivien, this sad little chapter from my life, from Evelyn.” Although the Guardian explains that she died of tuberculosis (from which she suffered chronically), she also suffered from bipolar disorder (referred to in her time as manic-depression). Whether Waugh was aware of this when he sent her this particular book is not mentioned. Estimated sale price is £2000-3000. No other books by Waugh are listed.

The collection also includes several volumes of plays by Tennessee Williams (which are not apparently signed), including A Streetcar Named Desire. Leigh played Blanche DuBois in both stage and screen productions of that play. There is also a signed copy of Gone With the Wind, including a poem by author Margaret Mitchell dedicated to Leigh, as well as a script from the 1939 film in which she played Scarlet O’Hara. Also listed in the sale are three signed biographies by Christopher Sykes. Not among these is his biography of Waugh which was published in 1975 after her death.

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Evelyn Waugh, Stylist

Posted on August 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

One of our readers has sent an excerpt from a 2014 book by literary critic Terry Eagleton (How to Read Literature) that compares the writing style of Evelyn Waugh to that of John Updike. In both cases samples are taken from their fiction–Waugh’s from his 1947 short story “Tactical Exercise” and Updike’s from his novel Rabbit at Rest. The excerpt appears on the website Marxist Update in which Waugh’s prose is described by Eagleton as having:

…none of the self-conscious sculpturedness of the Updike piece, and is surely all the better for it. Waugh’s prose is crisp, pure and economical. It is reticent and unshowy, as though unaware of the skill with which, for example, it manages to steer a single sentence from ‘They reached the village’ to ‘the serene arc of the horizon’ through so many sub-clauses with no sense of strain or artifice. This sense of expansiveness, of both syntax and landscape, is counterpointed by the terse ‘Here was the house’, which signals a halt both in the story and in the way it is being delivered. ‘A train journey of normal discomfort’ is a pleasantly sardonic touch. ‘Archaic’ might be an adjective too far, but the rhythmic balance of the lines is deeply admirable. There is an air of quiet efficiency about the whole extract. The landscape is portrayed in a set of quick, deft strokes which brings it alive without cluttering the text with too much detail. Waugh’s prose has an honesty and hard-edged realism about it which show up well in contrast to Updike.

Eagleton goes on to compare Waugh’s prose to that of William Faulkner in a passage from his novel Absalom, Absalom. Faulkner’s prose is overwritten but in a different way from that of Updike.

A blogger on the website of the John Updike Society has taken issue with Eagleton:

We won’t take Prof. Eagleton to task for that rambling and redundant unpolished paragraph, for if we did, it would betray a bias against spontaneous and unpolished writing, as opposed to Eagleton’s bias against the polished. As for methodology, Eagleton contrasts Updike’s paragraphs with those of Evelyn Waugh’s, comparing apples and oranges in various ways (poet-writer vs. writer alone, American vs. British, etc.) and praising her [sic] “honesty and hard-edged realism about it which show up well in contrast to Updike.” Faulkner receives similar praise…

Eagleton has been outspoken in his leftist political views which sometimes influence his critical opinions. That influence seems to surface more in response to the social or political content of the work he is discussing than when he deals with more technical matters such as style.

The texts of all three writers under discussion are available in original posting linked above. The full text of Waugh’s short story “Tactical Exercise” is available in his Complete Stories. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending us these postings.

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Evelyn Waugh at the National Trust, Edinburgh Festival and Houston,TX

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh is appearing all over the place in today’s media reports:

In the internet newspaper iNews, there is a story about problems being rained upon the National Trust, one of Britain’s once most beloved institutions. The Trust are the stewards of many of the country houses that Waugh feared would be lost when he wrote Brideshead Revisited in 1944. The article quotes Waugh’s remark in the 1959 introduction he wrote for the revised edition that “it was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house.” It was the National Trust that fostered that cult and is now struggling.

At the Edinburgh Festival, Letters Live sponsored a reading of Waugh’s 1942 letter to his wife about the disastrous Commando removal of Lord Glasgow’s tree (Letters, 160-61). This time the reading was by comedian Al Murray. The previous and more restrained reading by actor Geoffrey Palmer is far superior. See previous post.

Finally, in a chat on The American Conservative’s weblog relating to the “God is Dead” debate, a commenter noted:

Evelyn Waugh would have made much of the fact that years ago, a Houston megachurch had a restaurant called, “The Garden of Eatin’.” I presume this was birthed by that church’s advertising/PR consultants.

Houston is also noted for a major street called Waugh Drive which carries traffic across the Buffalo Bayou. The Waugh Drive Bridge over the bayou is famous for housing a large bat colony which is a well-known tourist attraction. The bayou is currently flooded by hurricane Harvey, and Waugh Drive is closed to traffic. What has become of the bat colony that lived underneath the bridge can only be imagined. One also wonders how Houstonians pronounce “Waugh Drive.” Since most Brits mispronounce their city as “Hooston,” the residents may have devised some outlandish pronunciation of the street and bridge to get their own back.

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Eating People is Still Wrong

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Andrew Donaldson writing in his column in the South African newspaper The Weekend Argus discusses the current status of cannibalism. This article, written with tongue firmly in cheek, was inspired by recent expressions of concern among South African politicians about the possible return of the practice in remote and deprived parts of South Africa. Among the sources discussed in the article is Evelyn Waugh:

Also to be avoided… is perhaps reading too much into literary works on Africa such as Evelyn Waugh’s landmark Black Mischief (London, 1932). That novel concerns the Oxford-educated Emperor Seth’s attempts to modernise Azania, his fictional island homeland off the east coast of Africa. To assist him in this endeavour, he recruits one Basil Seal, a shiftless college friend and heir to an English political dynasty…Before long, Seth is deposed in a coup d’état and dies while in hiding. At his funeral feast, Basil discovers, to his horror, that he has been eating the stewed remains of his girlfriend, Prudence. He returns to England where he becomes “serious”, which disturbs his layabout friends in London. In this regard, the persistent rumours surrounding the gustatory habits of such tyrants as Uganda’s Idi Amin, Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Central African Republic’s Jean-Bedél Bokassa seem to suggest that Seth’s Azania is still very much with us.

Other comments on the practice are sourced from writings of Edgar Allan Poe and JP Donleavy and collected songs of British sailors.

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Waugh in Brazil and in National Review

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Milan newspaper Il Foglio carries an article in Italian by Marco Archetti about Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days. After a quote from the book and some biographical background, Archetti explains the trip to Brazil:

One cannot know what caused this twenty-nine-year-old Englishman–who for a long time could not decide between painting and writing, had a past of carefree brief affairs, married  a “homonym” (“She-Evelyn and He-Evelyn,” they were called) but soon separated, and had a shriveled and disgusting mussolinofilia–to cover the wild stretch between Georgetown, Guyana and the Brazilian state of Roraima, struggling with nature, insects, the fury of the elements and the imperturbability of the inhabitants of the most remote outposts . But he knows an artifact: a story that was told to him of Boa Vista. And it was enough for him, because, if it is true that he travels because, says Waugh, it is part of life, he also travels because there is always a fairy tale to light our desires as eternal children who are subject to the spell of words more than to things, to the mirage of illusion rather than to the impetuous solidity of the world.

After describing how Waugh learned of Boa Vista and made his arduous journey, Archetti then concludes with what he found when he got there:

… after tremendous crossings with suspicious stock, after the fifteen huts in Surana, dry slides, after tiredness, dust, insomnia, snakes and nausea, there was Boa Vista: a handful of dilapidated buildings. Because the truth is that no one goes to Boa Vista, no one rides its hardened mud roads that go off in dusty trails in the four directions. So it is only left to leave, enduring in silence the truth of the journey – it begins as it ends – with bitterness.

The translation is by Google with some edits and any suggestions for improvement would be welcome.

The current National Review carries a book review by Terry Teachout of recent biographies of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (“Two Kinds of People”). In describing Hemingway’s legacy, Teachout is reminded of Evelyn Waugh:

The trouble with Hemingway, seen from the privileged vantage point of hindsight, is that he looks increasingly like a great influence but not a great author in his own right. No 20th-century writer would leave a deeper mark on his contemporaries, and as late as 1948, Evelyn Waugh, no respecter of reputations, unhesitatingly described him in print as “one of the most original and powerful of living writers.” Yet all but the very finest of his short stories now sound mannered and artificial, while the novels come off as little more than sustained exercises in mirror-gazing and pose-striking. I would like to like him more than I do, but the truth is that I find him almost unreadable, and my chronic distaste for his work is more than merely an allergy.

The quote comes from Waugh’s review (“Winner Take Nothing”) of Hemingway’s late work Across the River and into the Trees which appeared in The Tablet, 30 September 1950, and is reprinted in EAR, p. 391.

 

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Scoop Abides

Posted on August 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator has reviewed the latest novel by Ned Beauman with a nod to Evelyn Waugh. The title of the novel (Madness is Better than Defeat) itself implies a certain amount of irony and the remote foreign setting will resonate with Scoop fans:

Two rival expeditions set off from the United States to the jungles of Honduras to find the temple — one with the intention of using it as a location in which to film an absurd comedy, the other determined to disassemble it and take it back to New York. The two sides clash, each refusing to give way. The weeks roll into years; and life around the temple, populated with a disparate and distinct array of characters, steadily deteriorates into greater savagery. Meanwhile, Zonulet, rogue CIA agent (and primary narrator), under internal investigation, needs to unlock the secrets of the temple to prove his innocence.

The Spectator’s reviewer David Patrikarakos remarks that the novel:

…displays literary self-awareness. Much of the action around the temple brings to mind a more sophisticated and tamer version of Lord of the Flies. Meanwhile, the book’s early action sees the young director, Jervis Whelt, summoned by the reclusive Hollywood studio head, Arnold Spindler (a man with more than a touch of the Howard Hughes about him), who promptly tells Whelt that he is being sent into the jungle. It is a beautiful set piece that cannot help but bring to mind William Boot’s dispatch to cover ‘a very promising little war’ in the fictional Ishmaelia (based on Ethiopia) at the behest of the newspaper tycoon Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.

On the Spanish language news website 20 Minutos, their literary columnist, writing as  “Regina Exlibris”, was asked to compose an article covering books about journalists. Her shortlist of 6 includes Waugh’s Scoop (Noticia Bomba! in Spanish) in the #1 position:

News Bomb! Evelyn Waugh. Anagram. A Fleet Street press mogul called Lord Copper boasts of his infallible nose in discovering talented reporters who flood his tabloid with exclusives and thus gain readership over the competition. However, because of a confusion of surnames, he sends to “cover” the civil war in a remote African republic one of the most improbable journalists for such a mission. From that misunderstanding, Evelyn Waugh launches into a fierce and hilarious satire on the world of journalism, special envoys, information, misinformation and confusion. Regarded as one of the great novels of humor of the twentieth century, it is also a vivid and corrosive portrait of the profession and the sector that will start the laughter of both those who suffer it daily and those outside its world.

Others on the list include Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The translation is by Google.

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Lecture at Hertford College Announced

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A lecture on the subject of “Waugh’s Enemies” has been announced for Mo, 25 September at Hertford College, Oxford:

Cecil Beaton, Randolph Churchill, the BBC …. English writer Evelyn Waugh was not short of enemies. He was infamous for both witty spats and long-running feuds, and many of his adversaries ended up lampooned in the pages of his novels. As Oxford University Press launches its new edition of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, general editor Alexander Waugh and Barbara Cooke, editor of Waugh’s autobiography, will be working over Waugh’s extensive blacklist in Waugh’s alma mater, Hertford College. This lighthearted discussion will take place in the dining hall, overseen by the portrait of Waugh’s first and best nemesis: his history tutor, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell.

The lecture is scheduled for 1500-1700pm. Entrance is free. Booking details are available here.

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Oxford Mail Surveys Complete Works

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford Mail has published a feature length article on the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. The project will launch next month with the publication of four volumes, including Precious Waughs, the first of 12 volumes of “personal writings.” These are co-edited by Alexander Waugh and Alan Bell. Alexander, who is General Editor of the project, explains to the Mail:

“I do hope the whole project can be completed in 10 years and I hope the publication of the first five volumes in the autumn will galvanise editors working on other volumes. With Brideshead my grandfather invented a way of looking at Oxford, a mellowness, and it was that TV series in the 1980s with its soft rich tones that imprinted itself on people’s minds and drove people back to the book. My daughter Mary graduated in French from Christ Church about a year ago and it wasn’t the idyllic dream of Brideshead at all – she worked extremely hard.”

The story continues with this background information:

The novelist’s biographer, Professor Martin Stannard of the University of Leicester, and the late Prof David Bradshaw, of Worcester College, Oxford, have been co-executive editors of the first five volumes, which will be published this autumn, with the next set due to appear in 2019. No other collection of a British novelist’s work has been undertaken on a comparable scale. Oxford University Press signed up The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh in 2009.

This is the first time a schedule for the next volumes after the first five has been mentioned. There appears to be some misunderstanding on precisely when the first volumes will be issued. The Mail and OUP list the date at 14th September but the Amazon.co.uk website give 1st September as the publication date. Publication in the USA is scheduled for November. The story concludes with a mention of OUP’s local plans for marking the start of publication:

To celebrate the first five volumes, the Bodleian’s Weston Library will be hosting an exhibition of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford, curated by Barbara Cooke, from August 26 to October 22.

The Mail’s story is accompanied by a gallery of photos and drawings. There is one photo of Evelyn Waugh signing books in an Oxford bookshop which I do not recall having seen before and several drawings from the childhood diaries which may be appearing for the first time.

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